Two films, two directors, two dogs. Sometimes the festival writes its own theme lines.
The Palm Dog – the beloved unofficial awards show that celebrates the best canine performances via the festival’s official selection and various sidebars – has long been a staple at Cannes, having been founded by Toby Rose in 2001. This year it delivered a double bill of canine triumphs that had the beach crowd at the Cannes Members Club reaching for their metaphorical napkins – and, perhaps not coincidentally, both of the winning performances came from female dogs in films directed by female directors.
The lead “palm dog” goes to Yuri, the lost stray at the heart of Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor’s film. La Perapremiering in Directors’ Fortnight. Named by her new owner, Sylvia after the 1980s Mexican pop star who bounced off a rickety television set, Yuri upends Sylvia’s isolated life on a windswept island off the southern coast of Chile, setting the protagonist on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to confront childhood traumas.
Sotomayor, who adapted the film from Pilar Quintana’s novel, was drawn to the source material’s refusal to romanticize the relationship between a dog and its owner, and to what she called the startling tension between domestication and the animal’s uncontrollable nature.
After Sotomayor personally accepted the engraved leather collar, she said she wanted to create the role of a dog with a deep personality, searching for identity and freedom. In Yuri – troubled, willful, and brilliant – she found one.
The Jury Prize went to Lola, the scene-stealing dog from the Cleo Barnard series I see buildings falling like lightningalso in Directors’ Fortnight and recently reported on its People’s Choice Award win in the sidebar. In the film, Lola belongs to Ollie, a lazy, petty drug dealer played by Guy Lycurgo, who is inspired to change his ways after adopting her – and their relationship was described by more than one reviewer as one of the most intimate in any film at this year’s festival. The kitchen sink drama follows five working-class friends – Patrick, Shiv, Ryan, Ollie and Connor – who grew up together in a Birmingham apartment block and are now in their 30s, finding themselves on increasingly divergent, and for most increasingly constricted, paths towards the future.
Barnard attended the ceremony with Soprano, Lola’s actress and masked doppelgänger, who accepted the collar with great enthusiasm and even greater squirming. Finding such a local replacement is a Palm Dog tradition—Rose has long made it his mission to track down similar dogs when the actual winners can’t make the trip.
But it’s Barnard’s account of Lola’s backstory that gives the afternoon its emotional climax. Before installing the collar, she described a dog who had been living rough on the streets before being rescued by a shelter, where she was discovered and dumped. The director described her journey to the Cannes Dog Awards as a “true rags-to-riches story.”
The concert concluded with a karaoke tribute to Lola, with Toby Rose singing the first lines of Barry Manilow’s classic song “Copacabana”: “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…”
